Countdown

CHAPTER 30

"Tombstone's been hit!" Coyote called. "I see him," Cat said. "Two chutes! Two good chutes!"

"Thank God. Batman! Brewer! Where are you?"

"We're on the guy that flamed CAG," Brewer replied. "Shit, too close!

Goin' for guns!"

"Two-three, Two-one! I've got the shot! Clear!"

"You've got it. Breaking left!"

"I'm on him! Splash one MiG!"

"Look at that sucker burn!"

Coyote circled right, scanning the ground below. The sudden appearance of the three Tomcats seemed to have scattered the Russian MiGs. "Cat! Where are the bad guys?"

"On the run, Coyote. I think they've had enough!"

"Okay. Did you see where Tombstone landed?"

"Negative. Negative. There's too much smoke."

"Okay. We'll circle back. Hang on."

"Don't die on me, Sunshine!" Willis yelled, his voice raw. "Damn it, don't die on me!"

A hole the size of his fist had been punched through the starboard side of the aircraft, just below the canopy and just behind Sunshine's ejection seat. Air screamed past the hole, and the Intruder shuddered heavily.

Something was wrong with his starboard control surfaces too. He couldn't see through the smashed canopy at Sunshine's side, but he suspected he'd taken some pretty bad damage to his right wing.

Bracing the stick between his knees, he turned in his seat, trying to find out where all the blood was coming from.

There. The front of Sunshine's flight suit and undergarment had been torn open just over her right breast. He could see the thumb-sized, ragged hole in her chest, centered in a patch of blood-smeared skin. The blood was frothing with bubbles.

The Intruder thumped hard and Willis had to turn away, concentrating for the moment on his flying. He was at a thousand feet now, well above the hills, on a roughly northeastern course, back toward the coast. With the aircraft stable again, he returned to his clumsy examination of his bombardier/navigator.

That hole in her chest was an exit wound. Something must have spit through her ejection seat and up into her right side. Pulling off his left glove, he reached around in front of her, probing her side. There it was, a hole as big around as his finger three inches below her right armpit. He felt broken ribs grate as he pushed against it. She groaned, then choked. He reached up and pulled her mask off. The oxygen would do her no good if she drowned in her own blood, and there was a lot of it on her face, leaking from her nose and mouth.

That bubbling blood in her chest wound meant her lung had been shot through ― which was obvious enough from the trajectory of the shrapnel. A sucking chest wound would collapse her lung in seconds, would kill her in minutes if he didn't plug it tight.

With a blood-slicked hand, he unzipped his flight suit's shoulder pocket, then fumbled for the pack of cigarettes inside. Quickly, he stripped off the cellophane wrapper, discarded the cigarettes, and tore the now-slippery cellophane in half. One half he pressed down across Sunshine's chest wound.

As she drew her next liquid, rasping breath, the cellophane almost disappeared into the hole, an air-tight seal that would stop her lung from collapsing.

Reaching over her again, he stuffed the remaining cellophane in the wound in her side, then pulled her upper arm tightly against her body to keep the makeshift bandage in place.

And there wasn't another damned thing he could do for her now, except get the wounded Intruder down as fast as possible. He could tell from the feel in the stick that they would never make it all the way back to the Jefferson… and Sunshine sure as hell wouldn't survive ejecting into the sea.

He needed something closer at hand.

Tombstone dangled beneath his chute, watching the snow-patched tundra rushing up toward his feet. He bent his knees, keeping his feet together…

… and then the ground swept up into him. He hit, oofed!… and rolled, coming up with a double armful of parachute risers, gathering in the chute with swift, pummeling strokes.

He looked up into a contrail-painted sky. He could see Tomboy's parachute. She was coming down half a mile to the west. To the east, vast clouds of smoke piled into the sky from the holocaust in the Polyamyy Inlet.

With his chute discarded, he gave his survival gear a quick check: first-aid kit, flares, SAR radio, knife, pistol. Many Navy flyers carried revolvers, but Tombstone had always favored the satisfying heft of the M-1911A1. The big.45 automatic was virtually a relic now, replaced years before as the Navy's standard-issue sidearm by the 9mm Beretta, but still carried by some personnel who felt that the Colt was more reliable.

Not that a pistol would do them a hell of a lot of good. They were almost certainly behind enemy lines. Tombstone had two seven-round magazines, one in the pistol, the other in a flight suit pocket. Fourteen shots…

against MVD troops or Naval Infantry with full-auto assault rifles. Still, it was something. Drawing and checking the weapon, he dragged the slide back, chambering a round, then flicked up the safety. "Cocked and locked" now, he hurried toward Tomboy's chute.

"Okay, Navy. You're clear to land, south-to-north. There's only one runway so you shouldn't get lost."

"Thanks, Marine," Willis replied. "Have a corpsman standing by. My B/N's pretty badly shot up."

"That's a roger."

It had been sheer luck that he'd found the place, a Russian airstrip on the coast overrun by the Marines a few hours earlier. They'd been using it as an advance base for their Harriers and Hornets, but they'd cleared it now as an emergency runway for the incoming Navy Intruder.

Sunshine groaned. The blood on her face was bright, bright red.

"Sunshine? Sunshine, you hear me?"

No response. Oh, God, don't let her die!

The vibration was getting worse, and he wasn't getting any response from his right-side flaps. When he flipped the landing-gear switch, he didn't get any response there either. Shit! His wheels were stuck up. He'd have to belly in.

The Marines were sending out a radio beacon for him to home on. He could see the airstrip now, a single runway on the brown tundra, next to a handful of buildings. Smoke stained the sky to the east. There was still fighting going on out there.

His altimeter was reading 650 now. The air controller had already told him that the base he was angling toward was at an altitude of 275 feet, so the ground was sweeping past his belly just 375 feet below. Easing back on the throttle, he kept the Intruder's nose high, balanced just ahead of a stall, dropping now at a thousand feet per minute… lower… lower…

The runway expanded in front of him with breath-taking speed. He tried the air brakes ― no good ― and the flaps again ― still nothing ― and cut the throttles back to nothing, and then he was over the runway and dropping like a stone. His tail struck first with a sound of rasping metal… and then the Intruder's keel struck tarmac, tortured steel and aluminum shrieking, and he was battling the controls, trying to keep sliding in a straight line, but his right wing was coming around anyway, and he was out of control, sliding, sliding, sliding down the runway as flames exploded behind him like the wake of a powerboat.

Stopped! With a final lurch, the Intruder halted, its nose tipped into a rubble-filled crater, smoke boiling away from the aircraft's engines.

He hit the canopy release, praying that it would work, and it did. Then he was fumbling with his own harness and with Sunshine's. The aircraft was on fire, and he had to get the two of them out!

"That's okay, Mac," a gravel voice said beside him. Hands grasped his arms, pulling him from his seat. Fire extinguishers shooshed and hissed as Marines hosed down the flames. "We'll get your buddy."

"Get her out! Get her out! She's hurt bad!"

"Her? Oh, Christ…"

"Quit staring, Mike," another Marine snapped. "Lend a hand!"

"Easy there. Get her into the Stokes."

"For God's sake, take it easy with her," Willis said. "Best fuckin' B/N I ever had…"

His legs gave way as he stepped onto the tarmac. He never did remember being helped away from the plane.

Tombstone saw both the parachute and the man and broke into a run, the heavy Colt clutched in his hand. The guy wore a camo uniform but had a high-peaked cap, and he carried an AKM slung over his back, muzzle down. His back was to Tombstone, and he was bending over Tomboy, who was lying on her back, still in her parachute harness with the chute billowing and tugging in the breeze.

The soldier appeared to be alone. His back was to Tombstone, his total attention on the woman at his feet. Stoney raised the pistol but kept on running, trying to center the sights on a target that bobbed with each step he took.

From fifty feet away, Tombstone fired… a clean miss. The soldier turned, gaping at this apparition charging him with a pistol, then reached for his AKM, fumbling with its strap.

Tombstone fired again. Damn! It looked easy on the TV cop shows, but a pistol was a ridiculously inaccurate weapon, especially when fired while running. The Russian raised the AK's muzzle…

Again, Tombstone squeezed the trigger… miss!

Then there was a sharp crack and the Russian staggered forward, still clutching the AKM. Tomboy, still on her back, had her revolver out. She'd shot up into the Russian's back from a range of four feet. The man tried to raise the AK again…

Tombstone stopped, braced his.45 in both hands, and squeezed the trigger three more times in rapid succession. One of the rounds at least hit the Russian in the chest, pitching him backwards, sending the rifle spinning from his hands.

He dropped to his knees at Tomboy's side. "Tomboy! You okay?"

"Hi… Stoney." Her face twisted with pain. "Bad landing."

Glancing back, he saw her left leg twisted back under her body at an impossible angle. It looked like she'd snapped both her tibia and her fibula just below her knee. There was blood on her leg too, and a gleam of white bone visible through a tear in her flight suit ― a compound fracture, and a nasty one.

Quickly, Tombstone scanned their surroundings. The Russian soldier was dead, and there was no one else in sight. He could just make out the peaked roofs of a small village or settlement some distance to the east. They were sheltered to the north by a low rise, little more than a snow-covered mound on the tundra. Nothing else was visible in any direction but mountains, ground, and sky.

He touched the transmit key on the Search and Rescue radio strapped to his flight suit. "This is Tomcat Two-double-oh, Tomcat Two-double-oh, broadcasting Mayday, Mayday." He stopped, listening intently, but heard only the hiss of static, and once a garbled burst of something that might have been a partial transmission leaking across from a neighboring frequency.

Nothing. His transmitter might have been damaged in the landing, or else no one was listening on the frequency at the moment. He set the SAR radio to broadcast an emergency beacon, then turned to Tomboy.

"Let me take a look at that leg," he told her. First, he pulled a morphine syrette from his first-aid kit, pulled open the tear in her flight suit, squeezed a handful of skin and muscle, and jammed the needle home.

"That ought to make you feel real good," he told her.

"A real… high."

With a grease pencil included in the first-aid kit, he marked the letter "M" on her forehead, and the time. The small ritual was comforting, an acknowledgment that they were going to get out of this.

"You don't really think we're gonna get rescued, do you?" she asked. Her eyes were glassy, the words slurred. He thought she must already be in shock.

"'Course we are," he told her. "Brace yourself now. This might hurt, morphine or no morphine."

It did hurt; she fought back a yelp as he straightened her leg.

Tombstone looked around for a splint, but there wasn't a thing to be found but the soldier's AKM. He'd hoped to use the weapon ― an AKM with a thirty-round magazine was better than a pistol any day ― but he also needed a splint, and even with an assault rifle, he wouldn't be able to hold the enemy off for long once they showed up in force. He used his knife to cut generous lengths of nylon cord from the parachute, as well as strips from the canopy that he could use as bandages and padding. He removed the AKM's banana magazine, did his best to straighten out Tomboy's leg, then began tying the rifle above and below the break, keeping her leg rigid from thigh to ankle. He tried just once to set the bone, but he stopped when she screamed. Unable to see what he was doing, and unwilling to damage her leg more than it already was, he settled at last for simply immobilizing it, wrapping it in swaths of parachute nylon.

After a while, Tomboy opened her eyes as he worked. "Hey, CAG." Her voice sounded dreamy now, and she smiled. "Is it true what some of the girls are saying?"

"What's that?"

"That some sailor snuck into our shower and took photographs of us in there."

"Where the hell did that come from?"

"All the girls are talking about it."

How did news spread so swiftly through a ship's company? Tombstone had hoped the women would never find out about that episode. Obviously, though, he'd not counted on the incredible speed and power of the shipboard dissemination of rumor.

"It's true."

"Any in there of me? Heard there was."

"Yes. One."

"I must've… looked awful without my makeup."

"Oh, from what I could see, you looked pretty good."

"I'll bet. Ha! So much for all those women's issues sensitivity sessions. You're not supposed to notice things like that."

"So much for privacy aboard ship. Even one as big as the Jeff." He straightened up. "How's that feel?"

"It hurts like hell. CAG?"

"Yeah?"

"We're not going to get out of this, are we?"

"Sure we are. We've got our beacon out. They'll hear us."

"Yeah, but they can hear it too. You'd better take off without me."

"Nope."

"The Marine lines can't be more than five or six miles north of here.

Damn it, Captain, why should both of us get caught? Why should you get caught?"

"Why don't you shut up? You women talk too much, you know that?"

"You bastard! Get out of here now, while you can."

"And how effective a CAG would I be after that, knowing I'd run off and left one of my men, half stoned on morphine and lying out here in the mud?

What are you trying to do, Tomboy, ruin my career?"

She laughed, an involuntary snicker. Then the pain in her leg hit her and she gasped. Biting her lip, she shook her head. "Tombstone, if you don't-"

"Hush!" Tombstone raised his pistol. He could hear the rumble of an engine, nearby and growing closer. The source was masked by that low mound of earth and snow to the north.

Slowly, Tombstone rose to his feet. "Something's coming."

Troops spilled over the crest of the rise, spreading out to either side.

It took Tombstone a shocked half-second to recognize the uniforms, to put up his pistol.

"I'm Sergeant Bradley," the lead Marine said. "You Navy guys pick the God-damnedest places for LZs!"

"What?"

"You got yourself a shit-load of Russians heading this way, sir, but we beat 'em out by about two minutes. Come on. We've got a hummer on the other side of the ridge. We'll take your pal here."

Gathered up by the Marine recon patrol, Tombstone and Tomboy were escorted back to a cluster of camouflaged vehicles waiting a few yards beyond the ridge. Overhead, a trio of Tomcats boomed low across the tundra, the sunlight flashing from their wings.

The reality of his and Tomboy's rescue didn't hit home until that moment.

Admiral Karelin never did find out that Pravda's missile had not made it clear of the launch tube. He'd heard the sub's weapons officer shout the word "fire," but then he'd waited, and waited, listening for some confirmation of launch, and heard nothing but static.

But the missile had to have gotten clear, had to have arrowed into the sky over Polyamyy on its way to Chelyabinsk. The sub base had been under attack, he knew that, and it was possible that the Pravda had been hit within seconds of the launch, but nothing could stop an ICBM once it was clear of its tube, nothing!

But there was no further word from Polyamyy, and no confirmation from Moscow that the missile had descended on Chelyabinsk. Perhaps, after all, something had gone wrong.

Damn the American carrier forces! Somehow, they'd managed to take out the pride of the Russian Northern Fleet, spoiling for a second time an attempt to end once and for all the civil war destroying his country.

Always, it seemed, it was the U.S. Navy, the Americans and their far-ranging carrier aircraft.

Ironically, it was not the U.S. Navy at all, but an F-117 Stealth aircraft that punched home the final seal of Karelin's destiny.

The Kandalaksha base had been identified the day before by its microwave transmissions. During the night, several cruise-missile attacks and bombing strikes had been made against Karelin's bunker, a low, concrete blockhouse squatting on the plain north of Kandalaksha's military air base. Now, a Stealth Fighter was holding a targeting laser steady on the target, a three-foot-wide ventilation grill on the bunker's roof. The bomb, released moments earlier, was gliding toward the spot of reflected laser light, its control surfaces twitching this way and that to keep its glide path on target.

Smoothly, as though placed there by hand, the one-thousand-pound bomb slipped through the ventilator, bursting through aluminum slats and fittings as though they were cardboard, penetrating yards of concrete and steel before detonating at last in a savage blast.

Admiral Karelin never felt the explosion that killed him.